Re: <nettime> Chuck0: Google News rejects Infoshop News; Indymedia and blogs next?

[Francis Hwang <sera@fhwang.net>]

> Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 20:35:25 -0500
> From: Chuck0 <chuck@mutualaid.org>
> To: LBO-talk
> Subject: Google News rejects Infoshop News; Indymedia and blogs next?
>
> Google News rejects Infoshop News; Indymedia and blogs next?
>
> from Chuck0
> March 21, 2003

News changes fast. If Chuck0 is referring to the case of Unknown News, 
that case has been more or less resolved. More here: 
http://www.unknownnews.net/google.html

It's hard to say what actually goes inside a big company, but from 
reading the emails it sounds like the Google ad sales staff saw a 
controversial ad and wanted to reject it for being controversial. These 
aren't journalists or academics, keep in mind: They're ad sales. When 
pressed, at first, they invented dumb knee-jerk reasons for rejection 
(the suggestion that the slogan "What Would Jesus Bomb?" is hate speech 
is embarrassing at best). Then later they back down and apologize.

I was fairly nervous when I saw the headline for this show up in my 
blog aggregator: Google's been making some moves recently that make me 
quite suspect of it. (This is compounded, of course, by a market 
dominance that almost makes Google more of a part of the infrastructure 
than an independent service.) But it would seem that, in this case, 
Google has not gone over to The Dark Side. Yet.

F.

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